Nothing much
My daughter, who is visiting from London, and I were taking a lunch break for "silky tofu." She was working on her tan and a feature on imagination for New Scientist and I'd been translating Valéry's M. Teste and tinkering with poems all morning. "I'll make a salad," I said, "to go with your tofu." It was a recipe she'd made for me in London in February and I was keen to see how she did it.
My daughter, like my husband, who is from Marseilles originally, has a much more casual attitude to time than I do. "OK," she said, pulling a t-shirt on and hunting for her flipflops, "I'll just walk over to the student garden and get some mint."
When she came back I'd finished reading the Times front section, so I started on the soccer/football while she chopped ginger and added honey to soy sauce (I have the recipe on a post-it). It seemed France was pulling up its soccer socks, and the US might make it to the second round. But England wasn't doing so well. The sports section was all in colour: red yellow green blue, macaw, Apollinaire would have said. Easy to understand how people get excited about the game, even without watching it and the Americans seem to have completely stopped tsk-tsking about organisational problems and unfinished stadiums and transportation systems and given in to the sheer pleasure of Brazilian panache. The rest of the paper was in black and white...
The tofu was delicious and I forget what else I meant to say.
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